South Africa’s voice of freedom

JM Coetzee, the South African novelist who defines himself as a ’secretary of the invisible’, receives the Nobel prize for literature next month.

by Marie Luise Knott

JOHN Maxwell Coetzee was asked by his publisher: “Is this fiction or memory?” and he answered: “Do I have to choose?” Coetzee, now Nobel Literature Prize laureate and twice Booker Prize winner, denies any private or directly political reading of his work. Even his autobiographical works Boyhood (...)